Mystic River (16 page)

“You got any theories?” Sean said.

“Ten years ago,” Whitey said, “I’d be liking gang initiation rite. Now, though? Shit. Crime goes down, things get a lot less predictable. You?”

“Jealous boyfriend, but that’s just by-the-numbers.”

“Beats her with a
bat
? I’d say the boyfriend better have a history of anger-management problems.”

“They always do.”

The coroner’s assistant opened the driver’s door and
looked over at Whitey and Sean. “Heard someone wanted to lead us out.”

“That’s us,” Whitey said. “You pull ahead of us once we leave the park, but, hey, we’re transporting next of kin, so don’t leave her in the corridor when you get downtown. You know?”

The guy nodded and got in the van.

Whitey and Sean climbed in a cruiser and Whitey pulled it in front of the van. They headed down the slope between streams of yellow crime scene tape, and Sean watched the sun begin its descent through the trees, turning the Pen a rusty gold, adding a red glow to the treetops, Sean thinking if he were dead that’s one of the things he’d probably miss most, the colors, the way they could come out of nowhere and surprise you, even though they could make you feel slightly sad, too, small, like you didn’t belong here.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
Jimmy spent at Deer Island Correctional, he’d sat up all night, from nine to six, wondering if his cellmate would come for him.

The guy had been a New Hampshire biker named Woodrell Daniels who’d crossed into Massachusetts one night on a methamphetamine deal, stopped in a bar for several whiskey nightcaps, and ended up blinding a guy with a pool stick. Woodrell Daniels was a big meat slab of a man covered in tattoos and knife scars, and he’d looked at Jimmy and let loose this dry whisper of a chuckle that went through Jimmy’s heart like a length of pipe.

“We’ll see you later,” Woodrell said at lights-out. “We’ll see you later,” he repeated, and let loose another of those whispery chuckles.

So Jimmy stayed up all night, listening for sudden creaks in the bunk above him, knowing he’d have to go for Woodrell’s trachea if it came down to it, and wondering if he’d be capable of getting one good punch through Woodrell’s massive arms. Hit the throat, he told himself. Hit
the throat, hit the throat, hit the throat, oh Jesus, here he comes…

But it was just Woodrell rolling over in his sleep, creaking those springs, the weight of his body bulging down through the mattress until it hung over Jimmy like the belly of an elephant.

Jimmy heard the prison as a living creature that night. A breathing engine. He heard rats fighting and chewing and screeching with a mad, high-pitched desperation. He heard whispers and moans and the seesaw creak of bedsprings going up and down, up and down. Water dripped and men talked in their sleep and a guard’s shoes echoed from a distant hall. At four, he heard a scream—just one—that died so fast it lived longer in echo and memory than it ever had in reality, and Jimmy, at that moment, considered taking the pillow out from behind his head and climbing up behind Woodrell Daniels and smothering him with it. But his hands were too slick and clammy and who knew if Woodrell was really sleeping or just faking it, and maybe Jimmy didn’t have the physical strength in the first place to hold that pillow in place while the huge man’s huge arms swung back at his head, scratched his face, gouged chunks of flesh from his wrists, shattered his ear cartilage with hammer fists.

It was the last hour that was the worst. A gray light rose through the thick, high windows and filled the place with metallic cold. Jimmy heard men wake and pad around their cells. He heard raspy, dry coughs. He had a sense that the machine was revving up, cold and eager to consume, the machine knowing it would die without violence, without the taste of human skin.

Woodrell jumped down onto the floor, the move so sudden Jimmy couldn’t react. He closed his eyes to slits and deepened the rhythm of his breathing and waited for Woodrell to come close enough for him to hit his throat.

Woodrell Daniels didn’t even look at him, though. He took a book from the shelf above the sink and opened it as
he lowered himself to his knees, and then the man began to pray.

He prayed and read passages from Paul’s letters and he prayed some more, and every now and then that whispery chuckle would escape from him but never interrupt the flow of words until Jimmy realized that the chuckling was some kind of uncontrollable emanation, like the sighs Jimmy’s mother had let loose when he was younger. Woodrell probably didn’t even notice that he made the sounds anymore.

By the time Woodrell turned and asked Jimmy if he’d consider accepting Christ as his personal savior, Jimmy knew the longest night of his life was over. He could see in Woodrell’s face the light of the damned trying to navigate his way to salvation, and it was so apparent a glow that Jimmy couldn’t understand how he’d failed to see it as soon as he’d met the man.

Jimmy couldn’t believe his dumb, beautiful luck—he’d ended up in the lion’s den, only his lion was a Christian, and Jimmy would accept Jesus, Bob Hope, Doris Day, or whoever the hell else Woodrell adored in his fevered Holy Roller mind as long as it meant this bulked-up freak would keep to his bed at night and sit beside Jimmy during meals.

“I was once lost,” Woodrell Daniels said to Jimmy. “But now, praise the Lord, I am found.”

Jimmy almost said it aloud: You got that fucking right, Woodrell.

Until today, Jimmy would judge all patience tests against that first night at Deer Island. He would tell himself that he could stand in place for as long as necessary—a day or two—to get what he wanted because nothing could rival that long first night with the living machine of a prison rumbling and gasping all around him as the rats screeched and bedsprings creaked and screams died as soon as they were born.

Until today.

Standing at the Roseclair Street entrance to Pen Park, Jimmy and Annabeth waited. They stood inside the first bar
rier the Staties had erected on the entrance road, but outside the second one. They were given cups of coffee and folding chairs to sit on, and the troopers were kind to them. But still, they had to wait, and when they asked for information, the troopers’ faces turned a bit stony and a bit sad and they apologized but said they knew nothing more than anyone else on the outside of the park.

Kevin Savage had taken Nadine and Sara back to the house, but Annabeth had stayed. She sat with Jimmy in the lavender dress she’d worn to Nadine’s First Communion, an event that already seemed as if it had happened weeks before, and she was silent and tight within the desperation of her hope. Hope that what Jimmy had seen on Sean Devine’s face was a misinterpretation. Hope that Katie’s abandoned car and her all-day absence and the cops in Pen Park were magically unrelated. Hope that what she probably knew as truth was somehow, somehow, somehow a lie.

Jimmy said, “I get you another coffee?”

She gave him a raw, distant smile. “No. I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

If you don’t see the body, Jimmy knew, she’s not really dead. That’s how he’d been rationalizing his own hope in the few hours since he and Chuck Savage had been dragged away from the hill above the bowl. Could be a girl who looked like her. Or it could be she was in a coma. Or maybe she was crammed back in the space behind the screen and they couldn’t get her out. She was in pain, maybe deep pain, but alive. That was the hope—a sliver of it the width of a baby hair—that flickered in the lack of an absolute confirmation.

And even as he knew it was bullshit, some part of Jimmy couldn’t let it go.

“I mean, no one
said
anything to you,” Annabeth had said early into their vigil outside the park. “Right?”

“No one said anything.” Jimmy stroked her hand, knowing that just the fact that they’d been allowed within these police barriers was all the confirmation they needed.

And yet that microbe of hope refused to die without a body to look down at and say, “Yes, that’s her. That’s Katie. That’s my daughter.”

Jimmy watched the cops standing up by the wrought-iron arch that curved over the entrance to the park. The arch was all that remained of the penitentiary that had stood on these grounds before the park, before the drive-in, before any of them standing here today had been born. The town had sprung up around the Penitentiary, instead of the other way around. The jailers had settled in the Point while the families of the convicts nestled down in the Flats. Incorporation into the city began when the jailers got older, started running for office.

The walkie-talkie of the trooper closest to the arch squawked, and he raised it to his lips.

Annabeth’s hand tightened around Jimmy’s with such force the bones in his hand ground against one another.

“This is Powers. We’re coming out.”

“Affirmative.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Marcus out there?”

The trooper glanced at Jimmy and dropped his eyes. “Affirmative.”

“Okay. Out.”

Annabeth said, “Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. Oh, Jesus.”

Jimmy heard a screech of tires and saw several cars and vans pull up outside the barrier on Roseclair. The vans had satellite dishes on their roofs and Jimmy watched as groups of reporters and cameramen jumped out onto the street, jostling one another, raising cameras, unspooling microphone cables.

“Get them
out
of here!” the trooper up by the arch screamed. “Now! Move ’em out.”

The troopers by the front barrier converged on the reporters and the shouting started.

The trooper by the arch spoke into his walkie-talkie: “This is Dugay. Sergeant Powers?”

“Powers.”

“We got a blockage out here. The press.”

“Clear them.”

“Working on it, Sergeant.”

Up the entrance road about twenty yards past the arch, Jimmy could see a Statie cruiser round the bend and suddenly stop. He could see a guy behind the wheel, a walkie-talkie raised to his lips, Sean Devine sitting beside him. The edge of another car’s grille stopped behind the cruiser, and Jimmy felt his mouth dry up.

“Get them back, Dugay. I don’t care if you have to shoot their Columbine-fucker asses. You move those lice back.”

“Affirmative.”

Dugay and three other troopers jogged past Jimmy and Annabeth, Dugay shouting as he went, finger pointed: “You are violating a closed crime scene. Return to your vehicles immediately. You have no clearance for this area. Return to your vehicles now.”

Annabeth said, “Oh shit,” and Jimmy felt the blast of the helicopter before he heard it. He looked up as it flew overhead, then back over at the cruiser idling up the road. He could see the driver yelling into his walkie-talkie and then he heard the sirens, a cacophony of them, and suddenly navy-and-silver cruisers came tear-assing from every end of Roseclair, and the reporters started scrambling back into their vehicles and the helicopter banked sharply and cut back into the park.

“Jimmy,” Annabeth said in the saddest voice Jimmy had ever heard come out of her. “Jimmy, please. Please.”

“Please what, honey?” Jimmy held her. “What?”

“Oh, please, Jimmy. No. No.”

It was the noise—the sirens and screeching tires and yelling voices and echoing rotor blades. The noise was Katie, dead, screaming in their ears, and Annabeth was crumpling under it in Jimmy’s arms.

Dugay ran past them again and moved the sawhorses under the arch, and before Jimmy realized it had even moved, the cruiser was slamming to a stop beside him and a white
van tore around it on the right and blew out onto Roseclair, took a hard left. Jimmy could see the words
SUFFOLK COUNTY CORONER
on the side of the van, and he felt all the joints in his body—his ankles, shoulders, knees, and hips—turn brittle and then liquefy.

“Jimmy.”

Jimmy looked down at Sean Devine. Sean stared up at him through the open window of the passenger door.

“Jimmy, come on. Please. Get in.”

Sean got out of the car and opened the rear door as the helicopter returned, higher this time, but still chopping the air close enough to Jimmy that he could feel it in his hair.

“Mrs. Marcus,” Sean said. “Jimmy, man. Get in the car.”

“Is she dead?” Annabeth said, and the words entered Jimmy and turned acidic.

“Please, Mrs. Marcus. If you could get in the car.”

A phalanx of cruisers had formed a double escort line on Roseclair and their sirens raged.

Annabeth screamed over the noise, “Is my daughter—?”

Jimmy moved her because he couldn’t hear that word again. He pulled her through the noise and they climbed in the back of the car and Sean shut the door and climbed up front and the cop behind the wheel hit the gas and the sirens at the same time. They streaked across the entrance road and joined the escort cars and moved en masse out onto Roseclair, an army of vehicles with screaming engines and screaming sirens screaming through the wind toward the expressway, screaming and screaming.

S
HE LAY
on a metal table.

Her eyes were closed and she was missing a shoe.

Her skin was a black-purple, a shade Jimmy had never seen before.

He could smell her perfume, just a hint of it through the reek of formaldehyde that permeated this cold, cold room.

Sean put a hand against the small of Jimmy’s back, and Jimmy spoke, barely feeling the words, certain that at this moment he was as dead as the body below him:

“Yeah, that’s her,” he said.

“That’s Katie,” he said.

“That’s my daughter.”

“T
HERE’S A CAFETERIA UPSTAIRS
,” Sean said to Jimmy. “Why don’t we go have some coffee?”

Jimmy remained standing over his daughter’s body. A sheet covered it again, and Jimmy lifted the upper corner of the sheet and looked down at his daughter’s face as if peering at her from the top of a well and wanting to dive in after her. “They got a cafeteria in the same building as a morgue?”

“Yeah. It’s a big building.”

“Seems weird,” Jimmy said, his voice stripped of color. “You think when the pathologists go in there, everybody else sits on the other side of the room?”

Sean wondered if this was an early stage of shock. “I dunno, Jim.”

“Mr. Marcus,” Whitey said, “we were hoping to ask you a few questions. I know this is a hard time, but…”

Jimmy lowered the sheet back over his daughter’s face, his lips moving, but no sounds leaving his mouth. He looked over at Whitey as if he were surprised to find him in the room, pen poised over his report pad. He turned his head, looked at Sean.

“You ever think,” Jimmy said, “how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life?”

Sean held his eyes. “How so?”

Jimmy’s face was pale and blank, the eyes turned up as if he were trying to remember where he’d left his car keys.

“I heard once that Hitler’s mother almost aborted him but bailed at the last minute. I heard he left Vienna because he couldn’t sell his paintings. He sells a painting, though, Sean? Or his mother actually aborts? The world’s a way different place. You know? Or, like, say you miss your bus one morning, so you buy that second cup of coffee, buy a scratch ticket while you’re at it. The scratch ticket hits. Suddenly you don’t have to take the bus anymore. You drive to work in a Lincoln. But you get in a car crash and die. All because you missed your bus one day.”

Sean looked at Whitey. Whitey shrugged.

“No,” Jimmy said, “don’t do that. Don’t look at him like I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not in shock.”

“Okay, Jim.”

“I’m just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. Say it rained in Dallas and so Kennedy didn’t ride in a convertible. Stalin stayed in the seminary. Say you and me, Sean, say we got in that car with Dave Boyle.”

“What?” Whitey said. “What car?”

Sean held up a hand to him and said to Jimmy, “I’m losing you here.”

“You are? If we got in that car, life would have been a very different thing. My first wife, Marita, Katie’s mother? She was so beautiful. She was
regal
. You know the way some Latin women can be? Gorgeous. And she knew it. If a guy wanted to approach her, he better have some big fucking balls on him. And I did. I was King Shit at sixteen. I was fearless. And I
did
approach her, and I
did
ask her out. And a year later—Christ, I was seventeen, a fucking child—we got married and she was carrying Katie.”

Jimmy walked around his daughter’s body in slow, steady circles.

“Here’s the thing, Sean—if we’d gotten in that car, been driven off to God knows where and had God knows what
done to us by two ass-fucking freaks for four days when we were, what, eleven?—I don’t think I’d have been so ballsy at sixteen. I think I would have been a basket case, you know, stoked on Ritalin or whatever. I know I
never
would have had what it took to ask out a woman as haughty-gorgeous as Marita. And so we never would have had Katie. And Katie, then, never would have been murdered. But she was. All because we didn’t get in that car, Sean. You see what I’m saying?”

Jimmy looked at Sean like he was waiting for a confirmation, but a confirmation of what Sean didn’t have a clue. He looked as if he needed to be absolved—absolved of not getting in that car as a boy, absolved of fathering a child who would be murdered.

Sometimes during a jog, Sean found himself back on Gannon Street, standing on the spot in the middle of the street where he and Jimmy and Dave Boyle had rolled around fighting, then looked up to see that car waiting for them. Sometimes Sean could still smell the odor of apples that had wafted from the car. And if he turned his head real quick, he could see Dave Boyle in the backseat of that car as it reached the corner, looking back at them, trapped and receding from view.

It had occurred to Sean once—on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical—that maybe they
had
gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they’d become if they ever escaped and grew up.

The thing about that idea was that even though Sean would have expected it to be the first casualty of a night’s drinking, it had remained lodged in his brain like a stone in the sole of his shoe.

And so occasionally he found himself on Gannon Street in front of his old house, catching glimpses of the receding
Dave Boyle out of the corner of his eye, the odor of apples filling his nostrils, thinking, No. Come back.

He met Jimmy’s plaintive glare. He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell him that he had also thought about what would have happened if they’d climbed in that car. That the thought of what could have been his life sometimes haunted him, hovered around approaching corners, rode the breeze like the echo of a name called from a window. He wanted to tell Jimmy that he occasionally sweated through his old dream, the one in which the street gripped his feet and slid him toward that open door. He wanted to tell him he hadn’t truly known what to make of his life since that day, that he was a man who often felt light with his own weightlessness, the insubstantial nature of his character.

But they were in a morgue with Jimmy’s daughter lying on a steel table in between them and Whitey’s pen poised over paper, so all Sean said to the plea in Jimmy’s face was: “Come on, Jim. Let’s go get that coffee.”

A
NNABETH
M
ARCUS
, in Sean’s opinion, was one tough goddamned woman. She sat in a cold, late-Sunday, municipal cafeteria with its warmed-over, cellophane-’n’-steam smell, seven stories above a morgue, talking about her stepdaughter with cold, municipal men, and Sean could tell it was killing her, yet she refused to crack. Her eyes were red, but Sean knew after a few minutes that she wouldn’t weep. Not in front of them. No fucking way.

As they talked, she had to stop for breath a few times. Her throat would close up in midsentence, as if a fist wormed its way through her chest, pressing against her organs. She’d place a hand on her chest and open her mouth a little wider and wait until she’d gotten enough oxygen to continue.

“She came home from working at the store at four-thirty on Saturday.”

“What store was that, Mrs. Marcus?”

She pointed at Jimmy. “My husband owns Cottage Market.”

“On the corner of East Cottage and Bucky Ave.?” Whitey said. “Best damn coffee in the city.”

Annabeth said, “She came in and hopped in the shower. She came out and we had dinner—wait, no, she didn’t eat. She sat with us, talked to the girls, but she didn’t eat. She said she was having dinner with Eve and Diane.”

“The girls she went out with,” Whitey said to Jimmy.

Jimmy nodded.

“So, she didn’t eat…” Whitey said.

Annabeth said, “But she hung out with the girls, our girls, her sisters. And they talked about the parade next week and Nadine’s First Communion. And then she was on the phone in her room for a bit, and then, about eight, she left.”

“Do you know who she talked to on the phone?”

Annabeth shook her head.

“The phone in her room,” Whitey said. “Private line?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have any objections if we subpoenaed the phone company records to that line?”

Annabeth looked at Jimmy and Jimmy said, “No. No objections.”

“So she left at eight. As far as you know to meet with her friends, Eve and Diane?”

“Yes.”

“And you were still at the store at this time, Mr. Marcus?”

“Yeah. I did swing shift on Saturday. Twelve to eight.”

Whitey flipped a page in his notebook and gave them both a small smile. “I know this is tough, but you’re doing great.”

Annabeth nodded and turned to her husband. “I called Kevin.”

“Yeah? You talk to the girls?”

“I talked to Sara. I just told her we’d be home soon. I didn’t tell her anything else.”

“She ask about Katie?”

Annabeth nodded.

“What’d you tell her?”

“I just told her we’d be home soon,” Annabeth said, and Sean heard a small crack in her voice on “soon.”

She and Jimmy looked back at Whitey and he gave them another small, calming smile.

“I want to assure you—and this comes down all the way from the big office in City Hall—that this case is top priority. And we won’t make mistakes. Trooper Devine here was assigned because he’s a friend of the family and our boss knows that that’ll make him work it that much harder. He’s going to be with me every step of the way, and we will find the man responsible for harming your daughter.”

Annabeth gave Sean a quizzical look. “Friend of the family? I don’t know you.”

Whitey scowled, thrown off his game.

Sean said, “Your husband and I were friends, Mrs. Marcus.”

“Long time ago,” Jimmy said.

“Our fathers worked together.”

Annabeth nodded, still a bit confused.

Whitey said, “Mr. Marcus, you spent a good part of Saturday with your daughter at the store. Correct?”

“I did and I didn’t,” Jimmy said. “I was mostly in back. Katie worked the registers up front.”

“But do you remember anything out of the ordinary? Was she acting odd? Tense? Fearful? Did she have a confrontation with a customer maybe?”

“Not while I was there. I’ll give you the number of the guy who worked with her in the morning. Maybe something happened before I got in that he remembers.”

“Appreciate that, sir. But while you were there?”

“She was herself. She was happy. Maybe a little…”

“What?”

“No, nothing.”

“Sir, the littlest thing is something right now.”

Annabeth leaned forward. “Jimmy?”

Jimmy gave them all an embarrassed grimace. “It’s nothing. It was…I look up from my desk at one point and she’s standing in the doorway. Just standing there, sipping a Coke through a straw, and looking at me.”

“Looking at you.”

“Yeah. And for a second, she looked like she did this one time when she was five and I was going to leave her in the car for just a sec while I ran into the drugstore. That time, right, she burst out crying because I’d just gotten back from prison and her mother had just died and I think, back then, she thought that every time you left her, even for a second, you weren’t going to come back. So she’d get this look, right? I mean, whether she ended up crying or not, she’d get this look on her face like she was
preparing
herself to never see you again.” Jimmy cleared his throat and let out a long sigh that widened his eyes. “Anyway, I hadn’t seen that look in a few years, maybe seven or eight, but for a few seconds on Saturday, that’s how she was looking at me.”

“Like she was preparing herself to never see you again.”

“Yeah.” Jimmy watched Whitey write that in his report pad. “Hey, don’t make too much of it. It was just a look.”

“I’m not making anything out of it, Mr. Marcus, I promise. It’s just info. That’s what I do—I collect pieces of info until two or three pieces fit together. You say you were in prison?”

Annabeth said, “Jesus,” very softly, and shook her head.

Jimmy leaned back in his chair. “Here we go.”

“I’m just asking,” Whitey said.

“You’d do the same if I’d said I worked at Sears fifteen years ago, right?” Jimmy chuckled. “I did time for a robbery. Two years at Deer Island. You write that in your notebook. That piece of information going to help you catch the guy who killed my daughter, Sergeant? I mean, I’m just asking.”

Whitey shot a glance Sean’s way.

Sean said, “Jim, no one means to offend anyone here. Let’s just let it pass, get back to the point.”

“The point,” Jimmy said.

“Outside of that look Katie gave you,” Sean said, “was there anything else out of the ordinary you can remember?”

Jimmy took his convict-in-the-yard stare off Whitey and drank some coffee. “No. Nothing. Wait—this kid, Brendan Harris—But, no, that was this morning.”

“What about him?”

“He’s just a kid from the neighborhood. He came in today and asked if Katie was around like he’d been expecting to see her. But they barely knew each other. It was just a little strange. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Whitey wrote the kid’s name down anyway.

“Could she have been dating him maybe?” Sean said.

“No.”

Annabeth said, “You never know, Jim…”

“I know,” Jimmy said. “She wouldn’t date that kid.”

“No?” Sean said.

“No.”

“Why you so sure?”

“Hey, Sean, what the fuck? You’re going to grill me?”

“I’m not grilling you, Jim. I’m just asking how you could be so sure your daughter wasn’t seeing this Brendan Harris kid.”

Jimmy blew air out of his mouth and up at the ceiling. “A father knows. Okay?”

Sean decided to let it ride for now. He tossed it back to Whitey with a nod.

Whitey said, “Well, what about that? Who was she seeing?”

“No one at the moment,” Annabeth said. “Far as we knew.”

“How about ex-boyfriends? Anyone who might be holding a grudge? Guy she dumped or something?”

Annabeth and Jimmy looked at each other and Sean could feel it between them—a suspect.

“Bobby O’Donnell,” Annabeth said eventually.

Whitey placed his pen on his report pad, stared across the
table at them. “We talking about the same Bobby O’Donnell?”

Jimmy said, “I dunno. Coke dealer and pimp? About twenty-seven?”

“That’s the guy,” Whitey said. “We got him pegged for a lot of shit went down in your neighborhood the past two years.”